A Vinamilk farm in Don Duong district, Lam Dong province

F&N Dairy Investment plans to purchase the shares via put-through or order-matching transactions from April 8 to May 7.

If completed, the deal will increase the Singaporean firm’s ownership in Vinamilk to 18.69 percent, equal to 325.54 million shares, from 17.69 percent.

F&N Dairy Investment had previously offered to buy the same amount of Vinamilk shares between March 6 and April 3.

The original deal was unsuccessful and the company was only able to purchase 633,000 shares due to “unfavourable market conditions”, Vinamilk said in a filing to HoSE.

The Singaporean firm also failed to increase its stake in Vinamilk in 2019 and January 2020. In February and March, it bought six million Vinamilk shares.

Vinamilk shares edged up 0.5 percent to trade at 95,500 VND (4.06 USD) apiece on April 6.

The company's shares have lost 31 percent since January 30 as the spread of the coronavirus overshadows expectations for global economic growth and hits stocks markets hard worldwide.

As the company’s shares have continued to decline, leaders at Vinamilk have reportedly registered to raise their ownership.

CEO Mai Kieu Lien is buying Vinamilk shares to up her stake by 0.03 percentage point to 0.31 percent. Transactions started on March 24 and will end on April 23.

Director of material development Trinh Quoc Dung and CFO Le Thanh Liem want to buy 200,000 shares each.

The largest dairy firm by market capitalisation, Vinamilk reported 56.3 trillion VND (over 2.38 billion USD) in total revenue last year, up 7 percent year on year.

Its post-tax profit gained 3.4 percent on-year to 10.5 trillion VND (445 million USD) in 2019.

Cash and cash-equivalent assets increased by 1.14 trillion VND (48.3 million USD) from the previous year to 2.66 trillion VND (112.7 million USD) at the end of 2019.

Short-term savings stood at 12.4 trillion VND (525.5 million USD), up by 3.76 trillion VND (159.4 million USD) from 2018.

Short-term savings, cash and cash-equivalent assets accounted for 33.78 percent of the firm’s total assets last year, up from 27.29 percent in 2018./.

Vinamilk completes acquisition of Moc Chau Milk

Vinamilk completed the purchase of 79.5 million shares in GTNFoods to increase its holdings to 75 per cent in Moc Chau Milk.

What will Vinamilk do with the Moc Chau milk brand?

In early 2019, Vinamilk offered to buy shares of GTNFoods, the company which owns Moc Chau milk brand. In December 2019, Vinamilk completed the takeover deal.